William Watson: They\u2019re legalizing marijuana but they still won\u2019t trust us with beer<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nIn throwing them back up this perverse decision strikes a most untimely blow at our common citizenship as well as our prosperity and rule of law. The court upheld the obnoxious 1921 Gold Seal ruling with a nod to respecting precedent as crucial to the rule of law, even though, as Coyne noted, it has always been ready to jettison precedent whenever it wants, in the name, essentially, of social engineering.<\/p>\n
R. v Comeau is our parting shot from Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, who infamously said her job as a judge was \u201cto think about what\u2019s best for Canadian society on this particular problem that\u2019s before us.” As in: now you see the rule of law, now you don\u2019t. Or rather, you consistently see the phantom not the substance.<\/p>\n
The ruling is especially ill-timed given that B.C. and Alberta are at loggerheads over a pipeline. If New Brunswick can ban beer from Quebec to prevent widespread drunkenness or whatever the feeble excuse is, surely B.C. can ban diluted bitumen from Alberta to protect the coast, which would actually be a far more honest explanation than New Brunswick\u2019s threadbare protectionist cash grab.<\/p>\n
Or not. With this Supreme Court (as Coyne also noted on Twitter), there is no assurance of consistency. There is no reason to suppose if the Supreme Court disliked the outcome of a B.C. law, or an Alberta law excluding B.C. produce, it would give any but the most sneeringly short shrift to the precedent it itself just set.<\/p>\n
Which is why I call the ruling post-truth jurisprudence. The idea of gazing haughtily clean through the plain text of our Constitution, its legal context and the ringing declarations of our founders about the purpose of Confederation would please the most ardent literary \u201cdeconstructionist\u201d professor who insists there is no text, author, audience or truth. Or the most obnoxious politician untethered to facts.<\/p>\n
Of course the post-truth world is ultimately uninhabitable. Even that deconstructionist professor expects her employment contract, and her parking pass, to be honoured to the letter. And a \u201cpost-truth\u201d politician, whether named Donald or not, expects his fanciful reconstructions of reality to be mistaken for solid fact by the audience, which cannot happen if the audience believes there are no solid facts.<\/p>\n
More generally, any theory that requires us to accept as true the non-existence of truth is a classic Cretan-saying-all-Cretans-are-liars self-contradiction. And as the 20th century showed, when reality is banished in theory, what remains in practice is a raw contest of wills.<\/p>\n
No less by our Supreme Court, whose \u201cliving tree\u201d interpretation severs our constitution\u2019s roots and topples its trunk while expecting branches and fruit to hang in mid-air. It insists we obey the rulings it conjures from nothing by saying “let there be law,” which in turn requires that we understand its rulings. Why? And how? But it is not hypocrisy. It is post-modernism reaching the bench.<\/p>\n
As C. S. Lewis observed, if everything can be seen through, then nothing can be seen. If Superman can look through walls, why is he able to see the things or people behind the walls, rather than see through them as well? We were just told our Superjudges’ X-ray vision can penetrate Section 121 to reveal its opposite: that articles from any province shall not be admitted free into the others. Yet this ruling, too, will be vaporized by the same basilisk stare whenever the mighty judges somehow perceive new social needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
John Robson: R. v Comeau is legally wrong, historically flawed, metaphysically rotten and destructive. It is post-truth jurisprudence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7604,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603\/revisions\/7604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}